Ink Stained and Wretched

The loud scattered booming coming across the fields today is nothing more than thunder. Scattered showers cross the hills as a low pressure zone approaches, and with it the heavier rains that will wash the blood from the leaves but expose some of the shallow graves scattered across this entire area. There are probably 5,000 bodies now laying in the open between the lines. Several thousand more, the dead from the first day and those who died behind these now solid lines, have already been placed in holes only a few feet deep. Estimates vary, but it is safe to say that 8,000 men, and one woman, have died in the past 72 hours. Another 4,000 will eventually succumb to the wounds they had here, many of them in the impromptu field hospitals set up in the barns and fields surrounding town. The entire pre-war population of Gettysburg was 2,400.

Now the reckoning will begin. But no counting of the costs can be complete without a narrative to place it in context. The first outlines of the story of the battle, of course, came from journalists.

There were around fifty reporters at this battle. About forty of them on the Union side of the lines, representing mostly East Coast newspapers. Within the rebel lines there was an eclectic collection of foreign correspondents, as well as a smattering of reporters from Richmond and a few other southern cities. In the north the news that a battle was taking place was already in the headlines by the morning papers throughout the Union on the second day of the battle. From that point forward there were daily, and even hourly, updates.

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Most of the journalists arrived even as the fighting raged. Even photographers, with their cumbersome gear made it to the battlefield. Though the latter showed up too late to smell the smoke, they were there while corpses still littered the battlefield. These were the men, and they were exclusively men, who made their livings telling the stories of the dead.

Sort of like me I guess.

Unfortunately, a lot of what passed for journalism during the Civil War was pure excrement. Indeed, you could say that the modern ethics of journalists, real journalists, are almost the opposite of what one was seeing during the American Civil War. With some shining exceptions, the reporting during the Civil War, on both sides of the lines, was shoddy, partisan, sensationalist, and valued "immediate" over "accurate" to a degree that would shock a modern reader. And that is just the initial materials that were passed to the editors. Once in their hands every possible partisan political point that might be wrung from a report from the battlefield squirmed into the initial text until the resulting mass writhed with inaccuracies, innuendo and insult. That is just how journalism was back in those days.

By 1863 the three major New York City papers of the day were tied up in their own war for primacy in the Big Apple. Of course, with multiple editions hitting the streets every single day, they had a lot of room to fill. So all of them slapped credentials on brand-new reporters and sent them out to the armies with explicit instructions to send brief, breaking, and breathless reports via telegraph, as often as possible. In this case, they flooded the zone. At Gettysburg the New York Herald had ten reporters, the New York Tribune had nine, and the New York Times had three, and that is before you even start counting the reporters from Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and all the rest of the major cities.

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We always think that the things that have been happening in the news industry these past ten or twenty years are entirely unprecedented. That just isn't so. With 40 reporters at Gettsyburg, all trying to scoop the others and steal the national limelight, minute by minute, the result was the 19th Century equivalent of a Twitter War, with all the sacrifices to accuracy and reason that implies. Telegraph lines made it possible for a reporter to dictate a story from rural south Pennsylvania at noon, and by 2pm it could be a printed headline hitting the streets in Boston or Chicago or Cleveland, or all of them at once, if he was writing for one of the wire services. Fact checking and accuracy be damned.

Henry Villard, one of the original reporters on the war for the New York Herald, was frankly disgusted with these new hordes, even those from his own paper.

"Corrupt, and following their new occupation only from necessity and with mercenary intentions, they were not long in becoming the servile tools of scheming officers…Others had good intentions, but no capacities. Men turned up in the army as correspondents more fit to drive cattle than to write for newspapers."

Yet, of course, with so many reporters on the ground, and northern ground at that, at least a few of the good ones were bound to be there. Charles Coffin and "White" Reid were there, as was Villard. All of them had been reporting on the war for a significant period, and they had learned from their mistakes in the early years of the war. By now were pretty good at getting to the essence of the fight fairly quickly, and moderately accurately. No mean feat when trying to decipher a massive clash of armies.

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Not for these men the 200 words dashed off by telegraph six times a day. No, they would interview the men who were there, and view with their own eyes what they could. They would consider the inclinations of the sources, and then they would spend at least some time thinking about what all of their material meant.

They still made mistakes, of course, because deadlines wait for no man and making sense of a large engagement can legitimately take years, not just hours. But they did a decent job of it, for the most part. Along the way, one of their number wrote a story which was not only accurate, it was heartbreaking.

Sam Wilkeson was the Washington, DC bureau chief for the New York Times. As such he was in tight with much of the political power structure of the time, and occasionally accompanied various government leaders as they went about the country and the armies. One such visit, back in late 1861, had been in the company of then Secretary of War Simon Cameron. (Caveat: Wilkeson was with the New York Tribune at the time.) Sitting in with Cameron during a visit with General William Tecumseh Sherman, Wilkeson later published materials that were dismissive of what was considered, apparently by Cameron, Sherman's outrageous and unhinged demands for more troops. It was the first of the stories that would ignite speculation, unfounded speculation at that, that Sherman was bat-shit crazy.

Wilkeson probably had nothing personally against Sherman, and he himself never called the man crazy. He merely reported, apparently accurately, what Cameron had been saying. Still, he probably also learned from this that not all honest reporting is going to necessarily work out well.

Wilkeson seems to have arrived in the Union lines at Gettysburg sometime on 2 July. As any father would, his first stop was to inquire after his son. That son was a 19 year-old lieutenant of artillery commanding a battery of the 4th US Artillery in the Army of the Potomac.

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Lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson had the misfortune of being on the wrong end of the Union lines on the first morning of the battle. Placing his guns well forward on a small knob now known as Barlow's Knoll, Lieutenant Wilkeson had barely begun the fight when his right leg was mostly carried off below the knee by a Confederate cannonball. I say "mostly" because he cut the last few strands off himself with a pocketknife, or so later accounts state. Then he was carried to a small building slightly behind the Union line.

Unfortunately, as the rebels moved forward and pushed the Americans through Gettysburg and onto the heights beyond town, he was captured where he lay. All this the father learned when he arrived. "Your son has been wounded and is captured."

The elder Wilkeson then watched, and reported, through the rest of the battle. Indeed, his account of the final day of the battle is probably one of the best examples of immediate combat journalism there is, or can be. I will share the meat of it with you, so that you can see some of what I am talking about.

"Rebel officers with whom I have conversed frankly admit that the result of the last two days has been most disastrous to their cause, which depended, they say, upon the success of LEE's attempt to transfer the seat of war from Virginia to the Northern Border States. A wounded rebel Colonel told me that in the first and second days fight, the rebel losses were between ten and eleven thousand. Yesterday they were greater still. In one part of the field, in a space not more than twenty feet in circumference, in front of Gen. GIBBONS division, I counted seven dead rebels, three of whom were piled on top of each other. And close by in a spot not more than fifteen fleet square lay fifteen "graybacks," stretched in death. These were the adventurous spirits, who in the face of the horrible stream of canister, shell and musketry, scaled the fence wall in their attempt upon our batteries. Very large numbers of wounded were also strewn around, not to mention more who bad crawled away or been taken away. The field in front of the stonewall was literally covered with dead and wounded, a large proportion of whom were rebels. Where our musketry and artillery took effect they lay in swaths, as if mown down by a scythe. This field presented a horrible sight -- such as has never yet been witnessed during the war. Not less than one thousand dead and wounded laid in a space of less than four acres in extent, and that, too, after numbers had crawled away to places of shelter.

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The enemy's infantry, saving a small force of sharpshooters, was wholly out of sight at daylight on Saturday morning. There was talk on Friday night, after the battle, of organizing a column of pursuit."

The New York Times, with their excellent archives, contains the full story. You can see that clearly here. This extract I just gave you comes from the second part of the story, INCIDENTS.

But it was how Wilkeson opened and closed his account of the Pickett-Pettigrew assault that gives the story such poignancy. You can see that original here.

He probably wrote most of this story during the morning and afternoon of the 4th, sitting down and collecting his thoughts about what he had seen and experienced on the 3rd of July before putting his pen to paper. Then, sometime that evening, as the Confederates drew away, Wilkeson left the Union lines and went down into Gettysburg itself. There he found the grave of his son, buried beside the small aid station on the north side of town where he had died of his wound. Then, apparently, Sam Wilkeson came back to the American lines and finished his job as a reporter.

The main material was almost certainly complete by that point. All that remained was for Wilkeson to add a new beginning, and a new conclusion, to his dispatch. It could not have been easy. Then he filed his story. This was how he opened on 5 July 1863:

"Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fattened upon a central figure of transcendently absorbing interest -- the dead body of an oldest born, crashed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay?"

And this is how it ended.

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"What remains to say of the fight? It staggered surily on the middle of the horse shoe on the west, grew big and angry on the heel at the southwest, lasted there till 8 o'clock in the evening, when the fighting Sixth Corps went, joyously by as a reinforcement through the wood, bright with coffee pots on the fire.

I leave details to my excellent friend and associate Mr. HENRY. My pen is heavy. Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied! I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battle-field with his feet and reaching fraternal and lovingly up to heaven. His right hand opens the gates of Paradise – with his left he beckons to these mutilated, bloody, swollen forces to ascend."

You will not hear from me again until we close out this campaign with the final crossing of the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac in about ten days. As always, you can write to me at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.

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